Mars for the Many

Mars Atmosphere Destroyed by Solar Wind

MAVEN Scientists Reveal Mars Atmosphere Destroyed in Early History

Throughout Mars history, the planet has been pummeled by solar radiation.

In a press conference today, NASA scientists and administrators from the Mars MAVEN probe reveled their findings that particles streaming from the Sun at a million miles an hour or more​ have bombarded the planet since the beginning of the solar system.

And that bombardment -- the Solar Wind -- is responsible for stripping what once may have been a fairly abundant, and wet, atmosphere from the surface of Mars.

How?

Well, unlike Earth, Mars has no magnetic field to protect it.

It did -- once. But as the planet cooled, the magnetic field ​disappeared. As one scientist put it, the planet's "dynamo shut down".

And with the shutdown, an unrelenting stream of particles from the sun was able to impact the planet. Over the course of several hundred million years -- from about 4.2 billion years ago to 3.7 billion years ago -- the atmosphere was steadily stripped off of the planet's surface.